Stop Motion

Stop Motion

Early Stop Motion Techniques

Stop Motion has a long history and many different techniques have been developed and used over the past years. One of the earliest film to use the stop motion techniques was a film call 'Humpty Dumpty Circus', and was created by Alber Smith in 1897. The film used old toys which he brought to life with stop motion, he made these toys look like acrobats and real. One of the earliest and most known technique was the Zoetrope drum, This technique involves a cylinder drum which has pictures or painting of an object on the inside which are slightly different to create a sequence. There are slits around the drum so you can see the image on the inside, the drum with the images inside is turned round at a steady speed. Looking through the slits allows you to see each as i moves around, creating the illusion that the images and moving. This technique was one of the first stop 

Lumiere Bros 

The Lumiere brothers, Louis and Auguste, started off working at their father photographic firm in 1870, this is when they developed their interest within photography. In 1892 they began to experiment with photography and created moving pictures with it. Knowing they had something revolutionary they create a film camera which they patented in 1895, which worked by taking photograph and a high rating with creates the motion effect. 

The first film they made with this new camera was a film which shows workers leaving the lumiere factory, the camera was set up across the road from the factory and showed in a natural way. From this they went on to make more short film averaging around 60 seconds each, in 1895 they hosted the worlds first public screening for these moving picture they had created which mostly consisted of scenes from everyday life.

Workers Leaving the factory, Lumber Brothers (1895) - http://youtu.be/DEQeIRLxaM4


Later Stop Motion Techniques

Stop motion techniques have develop massively over these past years, more and more people are discovering their own way or method of producing different type of stop motion. Some of the most known methods that where created where methods such as; using clay models to create movement, bring models to life (Go-motion) and using puppets.

Ray Harryhausen

Ray Harryhausen was known for working on films such as; Golden Voyage Sinbad 1973, Jason & the argonauts 1963, Mighty Joe Young 1947. One of his very first films he worked on in 1940 was called Evolution of the World, During the making of this film he began to develop a technique. The technique that he went on to create was called Dynomation, the idea of this technique is to split live action and animation onto to different layers so that when over lapping they look like they are in the same place.

There are 2 glass screens, a projector projects the background of the scene onto the far screen and at the front is a projection of the live-action, in between these 2 screen would be the model(s) they use in stop motion. Ray Used this technique on many more of his latest films and most famously on Jurassic Park.

Development of Stop-Motion


Year          -              Type              -           Creator            -          Films 

100BC          -             (Zoetrope)                  -           Ding Hua                 -          

1829            -        Phenakistoscope               -       Belgian Plateau            -         Waltzing

1834            -        Daedalus Drum (Zoetrope) -        William Horner           -         

  

1860            -        Motion Studios                  -      Eadweard Muybridge     -     Boy Leap Frog

1895            -        Cinematography                -      Lumiere Brothers          -     Lumiere Factory

1896            -          Stop Trick                       -      George Meliere             -      Vanishing Lady

1911           -      Puppet Animation       -    Wladyslaw Starewicz      -   Cameraman's Revenge

1923           -          Clay Mation           -         Joseph Sunn            -        The Pen Wiper 

1930           -         Model Animation     -         Harry O'Hoyt           -         The Lost World

1933          -         Special effects         -        Willis O'Brien           -            King Kong

1940          -       Model Animation        -           Auto Car's             -  First Animated TV Advert

1960          -     Kids Puppet Animation   -      Oliver Postgate          -         Pogles' Wood  

1963          -     Model Stop Motion       -       Ray Harryhausen       -    Jason & the Argonauts

1970          -       Clay Animation         -          Peter Lord              -             Morph

1979          -          Go-Motion             -          Phil Tippett            -     Empire Strikes Back

1977          -  Stop-motion Animation   -           Mike Jithov            -      Disney, Mikey Mouse

1980          -       Clay Animation         -           Nick Park              -     Creature Comforts

Nick Park/Peter Lord

Nick Park and Peter Lord both play a big part in the stop motion industry, both very important in the later development of claymation movies.

Peter Lord is a British director, animator and writer, he is also the founder of the academy award winning studios Aardman Animation. The studios began with David Sproxton who also was a animator, they started by creating short films and animation, some of their work got shown on a BBC Tv series call Vision on. During 1976 they created a character from clay call 'Morph' which they used to create small and short claymation films that appeared on children's tv. Morph became popular in 1981 and they decided to give it its own Tv series called 'The Amazing Adventures Of Morph' which really kick started their animation studios.

Nick Park is a British director, writer and animator best known for the creation of films such as 'Wallace & Gromit' and 'Creature comforts'. In 1985 he joined Aardman Animations where he took part in assisting on projects before began the Creature Comforts campaign. In 1990 Nick Park together with Paul Cardwell and Phil Rylance developed a series of adverts for the 'Heat Electric' campaign called Creature Comforts which became regarded as some of the best adverts of all time.

For these adverts Nick Park matched animated zoo animals with a soundtrack of people talking about their homes. Eventually Creature Comforts was made into a television series.

 Nick Park uses clay model of characters that he has created and animates them by adjusting the models every so slightly for each take so that the final outcome is very fluent and smooth, this technique takes a long time to get one scene but is very effective. Nick's First feature film using claymation was 'Chicken Run' which he co-directed with Peter Lord, The film used the same techniques as Nick's Previous work. Chicken Run was also released in America and France and was hugely successful and won multiple awards including nominations for a BAFTA for best visual effect and best British film.

Nick Park admired the work of Ray Harryhausen in Jason and the Argonauts because of the way he moved so many skeletons and tracked and remembered every limb’s movement with such limited technology.  He thought Harryhausen’s work was so out of his league in terms of model animal movement, he tried to recreate these techniques in his own work although they were a bit simpler. Other people who influenced him were H.G. Wells, Rube Goldberg, and Heath Robinson. He was also a big fan of the Ealing comedies.

Many of Nick Park’s films feature some sort of machine that plays a major part in the film's climax.

This is partly due to his own father being an amateur inventor. Park created four Wallace and Gromit films using the stop motion animation technique, the models being made from plasticine. Wallace is an inventor who likes cheese and Gromit is a dog with no mouth. 

The character of Wallace was based on his father. A lot of his characters have upper and lower jaws with differing curvature with gives the effect of having a cheesy grin. This style of mouth is Park’s trademark and makes a films characters recognisable as Park’s creations.

Nick Park, Peter Lord and David Sproxton had all discovered their shared style and love for the detailed design of clay animation, They all adopted this same style and technique and went on using this throughout all the different pieces of work they produced.

Oliver Postgate

Oliver Postgate who died in 2008, was an animator, puppeteer and writer. He created and wrote some much-loved children's television programmes including Pogles' Wood, Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine, Clangers and Bagpuss. These programmes were all made by Smallfilms which he set up with Peter Firmin in a disused cowshed at Peter's home. Peter drew the pictures for the cartoons and built the models when they changed to puppetry but Oliver did the stop motion filming, wrote the scripts and did a lot of the voices. They managed to produce two minutes of film per day. Their first programme was for ITV about a Welsh steam engine called Ivor the Engine in 1959 and then a ten minute cartoon series called Noggin the Nog for the BBC. However these were all made in black and white.

Between 1959-1963 Postgate also assisted with the animation on the popular BBC children programme called Captain Pugwash.

In the late 1960's when colour television began, the BBC wanted them to produce more colourful characters so they developed the Clangers. At the time, the moon landing was on the news and they had already introduced a space traveller called Moonmouse in one of their Noggin stories, so they decided to make a whole family of these characters that would live on the moon. These characters became the Clangers. These where animated puppets. Firmin made the skeleton of the characters and his wife knitted their bodies. They looked like pink mice but with long noses. Instead of speaking, the characters whistled. Oliver wrote the scripts.

In 1974 he also created Bagpuss who was a saggy, old cloth cat with pink and white stripes. Although only 13 episodes were made, it ran on childrens' television for many years. In 1999, Bagpuss was voted the most popular children's tv programme of all time.

Phil Tippet

Phil Tippet is an American movie director and visual effects specialist. He is best known for using models to create life like characters, some of his most well known work is; Starters (1977) The Chess Game, Return of the Jedi (1983) The Walkers And Robocop Ed-209.He brought the models to life within the live-action scene, using the stop motion technique to make it move.

 From the age of seven he was influenced by Ray Harryhausen's Dynomation special effects technique in the film The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and decided that animation was what he wanted to do. After completing his degree in art he went to work at the animation studio Cascade Pictures in Los Angeles. While working at Cascade Pictures he was approached to create a stop motion miniature chess scene for the first Star Wars film. 

For the film Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, Phil Tippett helped to develop a new technique called Go Motion which is a variation of stop motion animation. Each frame has slight motion blur incorporated into it to make the motion of the models more fluent and smooth, therefore more realistic and less robotic. To do this there are many different methods; use jelly on the lens, gently bumping the model, gently move the table. 

Although Phil Tippett has produced many animated films in the past, where he took a major part in their production, in his more recent films he has been the Visual Effects Supervisor on films such as The Haunting and the Twilight Saga films.